Why Attacks on Jewish Cemeteries Provoke Particular Fear
Each new incident assumes added significance for Muslims and Jews who see them as part of a broader pattern.
Tarek El-Messidi had been planning to leave Philadelphia to visit family on Sunday night. But when he heard that Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery had been desecrated, he cancelled his flight. El-Messidi is Muslim, but he felt it was important to be with his hometown Jewish community at that moment, he said. “Both communities in America are being targeted right now. There’s a rise in Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,” he said. “That could have just as easily been a Muslim cemetery.”
Just one week after a Jewish cemetery in Missouri was vandalized, Philadelphia police reported that roughly 100 headstones have been toppled or damaged in the Mount Carmel cemetery. These are not easy monuments to knock down, El-Messidi said: He saw several
